Posted
by
Zonk
on Thursday March 09, 2006 @07:13PM
from the i-made-a-piggy-his-name-is-victor dept.

Alice, over at Kotaku, has a post up looking at what Second Life means to the Web 2.0 crowd. Cory Ondrejka gave a presentation at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference about what 2L is about, and dropped some interesting statistics on the audience. From the article: "Here's Cory's killer factoid, just announced here: Over 70% of Second Life residents have created an artifact - from scratch - in this past week. That's one crazy level of output. To give you a bit of perspective, that's approximately 23,000 human hours of play-work per day. Cory points out that this would cost Linden Labs over $400m a year to produce centrally, clearly not a viable business prospect. "

I don't see how, at least the way the system works in the UK. Either they are pre-pay, which are common amongst adults and minors, in which case there's no phone company records on the person; or they are contract, which will be paid by an adult regardless of whether an adult or minor uses it.

The only speech that is limited is extremely intolerant hate speech (ie Nazi propaganda, racism, etc). SL has a lot of content that would go well beyond most people's acceptance threshold, and it is allowed to persist in the Mature regions without much incident.

However, I have a feeling this isn't the "work of art" you're talking about. I've seen this complaint time and time again.

Often people who register complaints like yours seem to think that "speech" or "art" includes using a scripted weapon designed to kick people several server regions away (sometimes causing them to have to re-log) or to flood the grid with "grey goo" self-replicating objects that overwhelm the servers so that everyone is effectively DDoSed.

I prefer to think of this kind of "performance art" as being an asshole griefer, myself, and I'll lay down bets that this is the kind of "work of art" you were performing when you got booted.